In Europe
more than half a century afterwards.
One week later, the hospital ship
Steuben
was torpedoed; 4,000 were killed. Around 150 refugee ships in all were sent to the bottom in this way, including the
Goya
– with 7,000 refugees and 175 survivors – andthe
Cap Arconda
: 5,000 passengers, mostly refugees who had been ‘evacuated’ on Himmler's orders from Fossenbürg and other concentration camps, and 150 survivors.
Every day in winter 1945, 40–50,000 new refugees arrived at Friedrichstrasse Station in Berlin. An eyewitness described the arrival of a packed refugee train in the town of Stolp: ‘Hundreds and hundreds of bodies squeezed together, stiff from the cold, barely able to stand up and climb off the train.’ Stiff little bundles were unloaded from the freight cars: children who had frozen to death. ‘Amid the silence, the screams of a mother who did not want to relinquish what she had already lost.’
All those refugees found themselves in the midst of a new battle, the round-the-clock storm of death and destruction that had moved in on Germany from the west. In May 1942 Cologne became the first target of a
Tausenbombernacht
, as the victims called them. But Berlin was the favoured objective, it was ‘the evil capital’ and the lair of ‘the Huns’, and also – with its immense tank, artillery and airplane factories – the true industrial and administrative heart of the Reich. In autumn 1943 the leader of British Bomber Command, Sir Arthur Harris, decided to focus all attention on the German capital. The actual wording of the memorandum sent by ‘Bomber’ Harris to his commander-in-chief was:’ We can wreck Berlin from end to end if the USAAF will come in on it. It will cost between us 4–500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the war.’ Churchill was impressed.
A week after Harris sent his memorandum, on the night of 18 November, 1943, the city was bombarded by an airborne fleet of almost 450 bombers. The operation was repeated a few days later, but now with 750 planes. Entire neighbourhoods were in flames, 2,000 people were killed. And as the winter progressed the bombings became more massive; in the end, fleets of 1,000-plus bombers were pummelling the city each night. Berlin lay at the limit of their operating radius, and the risks were huge. The Lancasters had to carry so much weight in bombs and fuel that they could scarcely take off. At full throttle they would charge down the runway, airborne only in the last few metres. Fifteen minutes later, when they finally reached cruising altitude, the engines were glowing hot. Countless planes went down in aerial combat or collisions, their crews falling to their death or burned alive. One in every sixteen planesdid not come back. Until late 1944, the average crew member had a one-in-four chance of surviving the mandatory ‘tour’ of thirty flying missions. Of the 125,000 RAF pilots, gunners, navigators and bombardiers, more than 55,000 – almost half – were killed. Starting in spring 1944 the Americans joined in as well, with their enormous four-prop Boeing B17s, the Flying Fortresses, and Boeing B24s, the Liberators. From that moment the German capital knew no rest: the British bombed by night, the Americans by day.
On 23 November, 1943, Käthe Kollwitz's house on Weissenburger Strasse was hit squarely by a British bomb. The big parlour with the oval dining table, the enormous tiled heater, the drawings on the walls, more than half a century of family life: nothing was left. On 26 February, 1944, old Alexanderplatz went up in a sea of flames and exploding ‘block-busters’. By that point more than 1.5 million citizens of Berlin had been
ausgebombt
. In the end, seventy per cent of the city would be reduced to rubble.
Almost every city in Germany received its share of punishment from Bomber Harris. Ninety-five per cent of the glorious medieval centre of Cologne was destroyed. In Hamburg, on 28 July, 1943, the first firestorm was created. People ran down the street like living torches; almost 40,000 people suffocated in the burning cyclone or were roasted alive in bomb shelters that quickly became as hot as ovens. Almost all the old cities along the Rhine were bombed flat: Emmerich, Rees, Xanten, Wesel, Koblenz, Mainz, Worms, twenty-three of them in a row. In Nuremberg, on 2 January, 1945, a thousand years of history were destroyed in the space of fifty-three minutes. The castle, three churches full of art treasures and at least 2,000
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